Series A liftoff

Author:

Peter Walker

|
Read time:

1 minute

Published date:

July 15, 2026

Series A valuations hit a record in Q2 2026, with the top 5% of rounds exceeding $500M post-money — a dramatic spike as mega-funds chase AI-era founders.

Liftoff may be too mild a term for what's happening to the top end of Series A valuations at the moment. In Q2 of this year, the top 5% of Series A companies raised rounds at over half a billion in valuation.

Now that's not everyone of course! I find some of the emerging manager anxiety about this valuation spike telling. It may just be that mega-funds are competing for a small set of legible, highly pedigreed, AI-frenzied founders. Which should, in theory, leave many great founders outside this attention circle and in prime position for contrarian Series A investors.

But damn, the pull of consensus is strong sometimes.

Onwards!

Cheers,

Peter Walker

Author: Peter Walker

Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.